A participant to an audio conference or a videoconference may join the conference after the conference has started or otherwise miss a portion of the conference. When the participant joins or rejoins such a conference, the participant may desire to review the portion of the conference that the participant missed prior to joining the real-time or live conference.
Various conference systems allow a participant to listen to a recorded portion of a conference at an accelerated speed to enable the participant to listen to recorded and missed portions of the conference and get caught up prior to joining the live conference. Unfortunately, these systems generally do not allow conference participants to view a status (e.g., live mode or catch-up mode) of the other participants. Further, such systems generally do not allow a participant to request that all participants in catch-up mode join the conference live during designated portions of the conference. With previous systems, a participant, such as a conference leader might try to contact participants in catch-up mode through other, out-of-band means, to request that the participants in catch-up mode join the conference live. Or, the live participants would simply have to wait for the participants in catch-up mode to catch up to the live portion of the conference. In either case, the live participants generally would not know which participants are in catch-up mode or how far behind the participants in catch-up mode are from the participants in live mode.
Also, such systems generally do not allow participants to bypass portions of the recorded conference by skipping material based on, for example speaker and/or topic. Rather, typical systems allow users to catch up by bypassing pauses or periods of silence and by reviewing information at an increased playback speed. The speed is generally selected from a predetermined list of playback speeds and not based on an amount of catch-up time required by a participant.
Nor do typical systems designate portions of the recorded conference as sections that should be reviewed by all or some participants prior to those participants joining the live conference. Rather, all participants would typically have to be live to hear or view required information.
Because of the above-mentioned and other deficiencies, improved conferencing systems and methods that allow participants to review recorded conference information and to join the conference live are desired.
It will be appreciated that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of illustrated embodiments of the present invention.